Alsatian Spring Picnic

Four make-ahead dishes from chef Gabriel Kreuther

- By Owen Dugan. Photographs by Evan Sung

In both his Manhattan fine dining restaurant and his recent cookbook, Gabriel Kreuther: The Spirit of Alsace, the chef brings together past and present, Europe and the United States. Just as he grew up on a farm in Alsace and now cooks at the top level in New York, a meal at his eponymous restaurant might begin with a supremely homey tarte flambée and progress to a modern delicate sturgeon tart served under a wineglass filled with smoke. For this story, Kreuther offers four dishes from his childhood. They have the ease of making for home cooks, underscored by the knowledge and precision of a world-class chef.

Regardless of the venue or complexity of a dish, Kreuther's guiding ethic is that flavor comes first: “The tendency of a cook without much experience is to present plates that are pristine but lack taste. I focus on the taste first and then comes the presentation, not the other way around. Delicious food is remembered by how it tastes, not how it looks. When both combine, it's amazing. In-home cooking, when people lick their fingers, it's not because it looks the greatest, it's because it tastes amazing.

From a young age, Kreuther preferred food preparation on the farm to fieldwork. His family put up sausages and hams, baked, dried fruit, and cooked farmer quantities for every meal. On top of that, some relatives, especially one uncle, were in the food business. As a teenager, he entered the apprentice system but was repulsed by the cruelty. His uncle Michel took him as an apprentice at his country inn and his formal education began. Like a French haute-cuisine version of the Karate Kid, he started out with the mundane, especially endless cleaning. In his free time, he read Escoffier and Larousse and practiced technique.